“”Saint Paul'sEpistle to the Galatians had transmitted God's promise to the Jewish patriarchs, as an unbroken patrimony, to the Christians, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries you could hardly throw away an orange peel in the Holy Land without hitting a fervent excavator. General Gordon, the biblical fanatic later slain by the Mahdi at Khartoum, was very much to the fore. William Albright of Baltimore was continually vindicating Joshua's Jericho and other myths. Some of these diggers, even given the primitive techniques of the period, counted as serious rather than merely opportunistic. Morally serious too: the French Dominican archaeologist Roland de Vaux gave a hostage to fortune by saying that "if the historical faith of Israel is not founded in history, such faith is erroneous, and therefore, our faith is also." A most admirable and honest point, on which the good father may now be taken up.

While — in modernity — a serious and respectable academic field in itself, without which our understanding of the spurious and man-made nature of variousreligioustexts would be severely diminished, prominent scholars in the field of biblical archaeology such as Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology Eric H. Cline, author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (published by Oxford University Press and winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society's "Best Popular Book on Archaeology"),[3] takes the time to warn and warn again of the rampant interest in the field from well-funded pseudoscientific cranks out to prove whichever of the abrahamitic myths they happen to subscribe to personally, stating:[4]

While biblical archaeologists working today are generally more interested in learning about details of daily life in the ancient biblical world than proving or disproving the accounts in the Bible, many lay people have these priorities reversed. They want to know: Did the Flood take place? Did Abraham and the Patriarchs exist? Were Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by fire and brimstone? Did the Exodus occur? These were some of the original questions in biblical archaeology that intrigued the earliest pinoeers of the field. They still resonate today but are far from being answered by biblical archaeologists.

These ventures, which usually originate outside the confines of established scholarly institutions, engender confusion about what is real and what is fake. By practicing pseudo-archeology rather than by using established archeological principles and real science, the archaeological charlatans bring discredit to the field of biblical archaeology.

Eminent biblical scholar Michael Coogan and author of The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction (published by Oxford University Press) also chimes in to underscore the inherent fail in pursuing pseudo-archaeology to try and prove the patently false myths recorded in scripture:[5]

Correlating the meager textual references with the extensive archaeological discoveries has been controversial, to say the least, and similar problems exist for almost every excavated site whose ancient identification is known. As a result, it is now clear that archaeology cannot "prove" the Bible's historicity.

The selective use of archaeological data to support pre-existing religious beliefs (while ignoring data that contradicts their claims) also falls under pseudoarcheology. This can include, for example, the use of archaeology to support creationism and other kinds of biblical literalism,[note 1] the claims of British Israelism, or to support the Book of Mormon claims about the ancestry of the American Indians. The finding of Kennewick Man in eastern Washington state in the late 1990s caused a round of pseudoarcheological speculation about his origins, with Mormon apologists believing that the find backed up their claims about ancient inhabitants of the Americas, while a neopagan "Asatru" group believed it backed up their beliefs that ancient Viking explorers had once thrived in what is today the U.S. (as opposed to "discovering""Vinland",eh?, and buggering off back to Greenland).

The idea that such artifacts as the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, the statues of Easter Island, Mayan hieroglyphs and the Nazca lines are all evidence of ancient extraterrestrial visitors to Earth was popularized by Erich von Däniken, who wrote the pseudoarcheological book Chariots of the Gods in 1968.

Diffusion, the influence of one culture on another, undoubtedly happens. But "hyperdiffusionism" is the extension of this phenomenon beyond reasonable bounds to "explain" how "primitive" societies could do things. For example, to explain the pyramids of Mesoamerica as being built by immigrants from Egypt, some two thousand years earlier, by unknown means, leaving no traces, when the Mesoamerican pyramids were of a different shape, and with a different purpose; often based on belief that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were incapable of such achievements on their own. See also Thor Heyerdahl.